"Cairn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Medway. A farmhouse with the name of Horsted, at the point farther back where the Rochester to Maidstone road is joined by the road from Chatham, stands, it is believed, on the grave of Horsa. And about a mile and a half north of Aylesford, a grey old cairn, set on a green sward in the midst of a cornfield, is also closely associated with the first great victory won by English people on the soil which they were destined to make their own and distinguish with their name. In his Short History ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... Kit and Tom, the shepherd, stopped to rest behind a cairn on the summit of Swinset moor. Close by, the two score sheep stood in a compact flock, with heads towards the panting dogs. They were Herdwicks, a small, hardy breed that best withstands the rain and snow that sweep the high fells in the lambing season. When ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... barrow, buckler on arm and battle-sword by his side. His war-horse stands at the cairn pawing the earth and chafing as though impatient to ...
— Northland Heroes • Florence Holbrook
... bowlder; pebble; calculus, concretion; flint, granite, marble, quartz, adamant, shale, flag, flagstone, cobblestone, rubble, brash, shingle; monolith, polyolith; cairn, muller, merestone; cromlech; madstone, snakestone; aerolite, meteorite; (of fruit) endocarp, pit, nut, putamen. Associated Words: petrify, petrifaction, lithology, lithography, lithic, lapidary, lithoglypher, lithoglyptic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... too hard to do any burying. I made the bones into a decent heap and piled rocks into a cairn over them. If I said a kind of a prayer, too, it was no one's business but that of the God who heard me; the boys had been young, and they were dead while I lived, which was enough to make a man pray. I felt better when ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... her on the cliffs of Pleinmont, where a cairn long marked her resting-place. Tita was taken to the Vale; all attempts to restore her from the shock which her nerves had received failed till on one sunny morning Hilda's infant was placed on her knees: when the child crowed, and smiled at her, the cloud imperceptibly ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... has only very lately become obsolete in Scotland. The editor remembers, that, a few years ago, a cairn was pointed out to him in the King's Park of Edinburgh, which had been raised in detestation of a cruel murder, perpetrated by one Nicol Muschet, on the body of his wife, in that place, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... for the moment as aide-de-camp, had spent the day on horseback. Released in the late afternoon, lodged in a hut at the edge of the small camp, he used the moment's leisure to climb a small hill and at its height to throw himself down beside a broken cairn. He shut his eyes, but after a few moments opened them and gazed upon the camp of Cope, covering also but a little space, so small were the armies. His ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... planted by the old Peterboroughs, now all gone. Along that river bank were some of the broadest haughs with which I am acquainted, and some of the best salmon streams, then woods and sheep pastures and a dozen miles of heather hills—up to Cairn-monearn and Kerloach—giving the best grouse-shooting in the country. It is in truth a charming water-side even in the eyes of a critical old man, or of a tourist in search of the picturesque; but for a boy who lived there, shot, and fished there, while all the houses ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... to them the incident of the fall of the tube, and the reason of its preservation, he pointed with pardonable pride to a pile of stones which the workmen had there raised to commemorate the event. While nearly all the other marks of the work during its progress had been obliterated, that cairn had been left standing in commemoration of the caution ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... clutching its abdomen and whimpering. There had been a quick flurry of shots that had felled all four of the assailants, and Seldar Glav had finished the wounded creature with his dagger, but Eldra was dead. They had built a cairn of stones over her body, as they had done over the bodies of the two children killed by the cold. But, after an examination to see what sort of things they were, they had tumbled the bodies of the Hairy ...
— Genesis • H. Beam Piper
... swollen torrent by our side roared among its boulders right lustily; and occasionally a heavy farm-wagon crossed the country bridge which spans the ravine just above us, its rumblings echoing in the quarried glen for all the world like distant thunder. Before turning in, each built a cairn upon the beach, at the point which he thought the water might reach by morning. The Boy, more venturesome than the rest, piled his cairn highest up the slope; and when daylight revealed the fact that the river, in ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... over the Pacific, and the white sea-fog whipped through the streets, dimming the splendors of the electric lights. It is the use of this city, her men and women folk, to parade between the hours of eight and ten a certain street called Cairn Street, where the finest shops are situated. Here the click of high heels on the pavement is loudest, here the lights are brightest, and here the thunder of the traffic is most overwhelming. I watched Young California, ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... upon the Erebus and Terror, give them three cheers, and go away into the desolate waste—to die! Point Victory their object. They gained it, and then their helplessness came and stared them in the face. In a cairn on the point Fitzjames placed a brief record, and that is all. They have only food for a month more, and day by day the strong are growing weak and the ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... centre of this lake rises a mountain of dark, greenish colour, resembling an immense cairn constructed by the hands of Titans. Upon its summit rests a cloud of white fog collected by evaporation from the surrounding water, which has been condensed by the freshness of the night. The numerous dark fissures distinguishable along the ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... to remedy, my Father," said the Poor Thing; "for we must go this night to the little isle of sheep, where our fathers lie in the dead-cairn, and to-morrow to the Earl's Hall, and there shall you find a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sent out by Sir Joseph Banks to collect for Kew Gardens. He was industrious and painstaking in his vocation, but sadly overburdened with vanity. He made one important journey to the Blue Mountains, with the usual result. He erected a cairn of stones at the furthest point he reached, which Governor Macquarie ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... Bedwyr sat on a beacon-cairn on the summit of Plinlimmon, in the highest wind that ever was, they looked around them and saw a great smoke, afar off. Then said Kay, "By the hand of my friend, yonder is the fire of a robber." Then they hastened towards ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... and as her clouded brain became calm, it was occupied by one idea, to the exclusion of all others,—prayer for the repose of her dead. The body of the Sergeant was buried near Maume, but O'Malley and his three sons were buried together under the cairn in a long disused churchyard through which the road passed, a churchyard like thousands more in Ireland, where the grave-stones are hidden by the nettles and weeds. Thither, with a love stronger than death, goes the poor old woman every day, and, untiring in her devotion, spends her life reciting ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... out, A hundred voices joined the shout; With hark and whoop and wild halloo, No rest Benvoirlich's echoes knew. Far from the tumult fled the roe, Close in her covert cowered the doe, The falcon, from her cairn on high, Cast on the rout a wondering eye, Till far beyond her piercing ken The hurricane had swept the glen. Faint, and more faint, its failing din Returned from cavern, cliff, and linn, And silence settled, wide and still, On the lone wood ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... much marvel and inquiry as any mysterious building of old, the purpose of which we do not understand, and the use of which we cannot now account for. They will be seemingly as meaningless as any lonely cairn, isolated broken piece of wall, or solitary fragment of a building, of which no principal part remains, and which puzzles us to account ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... Roderick, for the word! It nerves my heart, it steels my sword; For I have sworn this braid to stain In the best blood that warms thy vein. Now, truce, farewell! and, ruth, begone!— Yet think not that by thee alone, Proud Chief! can courtesy be shown; Though not from copse, or heath, or cairn, Start at my whistle clansmen stern, Of this small horn one feeble blast Would fearful odds against thee cast. But fear not—doubt not—which thou wilt— We try this quarrel hilt to hilt."— Then each at once his falchion ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... climbed high above timberline on the Long's Peak trail, and, following my adventurous impulse, left the cairn-marked pathway and swung over to the big moraine that lay south. From its top I peeped into the chasm that lies between it and the Peak, then angled down its abrupt slope to a sparkling waterfall, and, following along the swift, icy stream above it, was climbing toward Chasm Lake, when an eerie ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... ambitious labourers in the field of investigation which is only as yet partly cultivated, may each assist, by carefully collecting a little heap of ascertained facts; and it is, indeed, the duty of each as he passes to add his pebble to the slowly accumulating cairn of recorded human knowledge. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... was now choked with masonry, and bridged by a fallen rafter. The two farther walls still stood, the sun shining through their empty windows; but the remainder of the building had collapsed, and now lay in a great cairn of ruin, grimed with fire. Already in the interior a few plants were springing green ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Nature keep Equal faith with all who sleep, Set her watch of hills around Christian grave and heathen mound, And to cairn and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... a farmer in the parish of Thrums, but he had been born at Tilliedrum; and Thrums thanked Providence for that, when it saw him suspended between two hams from his kitchen rafters. The custom was to cart suicides to the quarry at the Galla pond and bury them near the cairn that had supported the gallows; but on this occasion not a farmer in the parish would lend a cart, and for a week the corpse lay on the sanded floor as it had been cut down—an object of awe-struck interest to boys ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... occasions since I have observed the same manoeuvre, which is doubtless the regular procedure with this and other species. The smaller orange-spotted wasp just alluded to indicated to me the location of her den by pausing suggestively in front of a tiny cairn. In this instance a small flat stone, considerably larger than the tunnel, had been laid over the opening, and the others piled upon it. On two occasions I have surprised this same species of wasp industriously engaged in the selection of a suitable flat foundation-stone with which to cover ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... sleeps high up on wintry Knock-na-rea In an old cairn of stones; while her poor women Must lie and jog in the wave if they would sleep Being water born—yet if she cry their names They run up on the land and dance in the moon Till they are giddy and would love as men do, And be as patient and as pitiful. But there is nothing that will stop in their ...
— The Countess Cathleen • William Butler Yeats
... is the tradition that a large heap of stones formed like an Esquimaux hut on the highest point of Appledore, was built there by Captain John Smith and his men as a memorial of their discovery of the islands. This heap of stones is a veritable cairn, such as climbers of the Alps build on the summits of those peaks which they have ascended for the first time. It is customary in such cases to insert a champagne bottle among the stones, containing the card of the fortunate explorer; but ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... go and get there," said Cuchulainn. They go then till they reach it. When they had reached the mountain, Cuchulainn asked: "What is the white cairn yonder on ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown
... kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path, Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattle and woodwork made, Thy bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the earth, And a small and feeble populace ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... CAIRN, a heap of stones often, though not always, loosely thrown together, generally by way of a sepulchral monument, and it would seem sometimes in execration of some ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Three years before that event they were driven from their old capital Kapilavastu; but they formed a new one fifteen miles further south, just beyond the present frontier of Nepal, and there they erected a stupa or massive stone cairn, to guard the portion of the ashes of the Buddha which was committed ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... stars unnumber'd Tremble in the breeze-swept tarn, And the bat that all day slumber'd Flits about the lonely barn; And the shapes that shrink from garish Noon are peopling cairn and lea; And thy sire is almost bearish If kept waiting for ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... the steep cliffs of the river, and at the edge of these cliffs was a great cairn of rocks in which for one night Miki had sought shelter. He had not forgotten the tunnel into the tumbled mass of rock debris, nor how easily it could be defended from within. Once in that tunnel ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... morning dawned, the shower discontinued, a few laggards fell in scattering confusion over the prostrate city, and the sun climbing the eastern sky sent its peaceful reassuring light upon a cairn-like heap of desolation. The chilled surface of the fallen meteorites were broken up by areas of glowing cinder-like surfaces. The glittering and opaline city of glass, the City of Scandor, capital of the Martian world, was buried beneath the scorching and stony fragments ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... reached over mountains and moor, To a heath where the oak-tree grew lonely and hoar: "Now here let us place the grey stone of her cairn: Why speak ye no word?" ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... Pole and back. When we had completed all this repacking and had everything ready, two of us went over to Mount Betty, and collected as many different specimens of rock as we could lay our hands on. At the same time we built a great cairn, and left there a can of 17 litres of paraffin, two packets of matches — containing twenty boxes — and an account of our expedition. Possibly someone may find a use for these ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... And we must have something reliable," I said, "to stand dishes and things on at meals. We can't pile them all on the table at once like a cairn. To tell you the truth," I added, "I've had my eye on an old oak dresser at Smalley's for a long time. It would be a good investment—at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... demonstrated by my investigations at Lochlee and elsewhere. {28a} It would be still more necessary in a substratum of timbers that was intended (as will be afterwards explained) to bear the weight of a superincumbent cairn. Underneath the layers of horizontal woodwork some portions of heather, bracken, and brushwood were detected, and below this came a succession of thin beds of mud, loam, sand, gravel, and finally the blue clay which forms the solum of the river valley. {28b} The piles penetrated ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... this time he was 'cross the ford, Whaur in the snaw the chapman smoored;[67] And past the birks and meikle stane, Whaur drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane; And through the whins, and by the cairn, Whaur hunters fand the murdered bairn; And near the thorn, aboon the well, Whaur Mungo's mither hanged hersel'. Before him Doon pours all his floods; The doubling storm roars through the woods; The lightnings ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... towered a precipice, on the bare crest of which stood a heap of stones piled like a column—the remains, probably, of a cairn. On this commanding point Nicholas perceived a female figure, dilated to gigantic proportions against the sky, who, as far as he could distinguish, seemed watching him, and making signs to him, apparently to go back; but he paid little regard to them, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Montenegro, when the traveller is filled with a sense of peace at the grandeur of the wild mountainous scenery, or the beauty of a sylvan forest glade, a rough cross, or cairn of stones, will be pointed out where men have met a sudden and ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... moves with giant grace— That wild, tho' not unhandsome face; That voice which sometimes in its tone Is softer than the wood-dove's moan, At others, louder than the storm Which beats the side of old Cairn Gorm; That hand, as white as falling snow, Which yet can fell the stoutest foe; And, last of all, that noble heart, Which ne'er from honour's path would start, Shall never be forgot by me— So ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... you had only seen oor street! The beach ootby at the Saut Pan, whaur there's a free coup for rubbitch, was naething till't! It juist mindit me o' the picture, in oor big Bible, o' Jerusalem when the fowk cam' back frae Babylon till't—it was juist a' lyin' a cairn o' ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... to various individuals in a most mysterious manner; till at last a clown, with a few grains of more courage than the rest, loaded his gun and put a sixpence into it, with the intention of stealing upon him as he sat most mysteriously chattering on the top of a cairn of stones, and then shooting him with silver, which is known never to fail in finishing the imps of the Evil One. And lucky indeed was it for pug that he chanced, through whim, to abscond from that quarter; for if he had not so disappeared, he might have ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... long and cool, the burials began. A shallow grave was scooped at Wallulah's feet for the bodies of the two canoe-men. Then chiefs—for they only might bury Multnomah's daughter—entombed her in a cairn; being Upper Columbia Indians, they buried her, after the manner of their people, under a heap of stone. Rocks and bowlders were built around and over her body, yet without touching it, until the sad dead face was shut out from view. And still the stones were piled above her; higher ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... of Midlothian when Sharpitlaw, accompanied by Ratcliffe and Madge Wildfire, go to Muschat's Cairn in ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... one month after another till three months had passed, and the fourth was far advanced. She heaped a cairn of stones over his tomb, which formed the hill on which the Cathedral of Revel now stands. One day she was carrying a great stone to the cairn, but found herself too weak, and let it fall. She sat down on it, and lamented her sad ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... Brangwaine, she reappears in romance, giving a love-potion to Tristram—perhaps a reminiscence of her former functions as a goddess of love, or earlier of fertility. In the Mabinogion she is buried in Anglesey at Ynys Bronwen, where a cairn with bones discovered in 1813 was held to be the grave and remains ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... pebble on the cairn Of him, though dead, undying; Sweet Nature's nursling, bonniest bairn Beneath ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in Augustin's life. Following immediately upon the mental crisis which had even worn out his body, he seems to be experiencing the pleasure of convalescence. He slackens, and, as he says himself, he rests. His excitement is quenched, but his faith remains as firm as ever. With a cairn and supremely lucid mind he judges his condition; he sees clearly all that he has still to do ere he becomes a thorough Christian. First, he must grow familiar with the Scripture, solve certain urgent questions—that of the soul, for example, its nature ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... of a natural strategist of no mean courage and ability. The great chief was buried without honors outside the cemetery at the post, and for some years the grave was marked by a mere board at its head. Recently some women have built a cairn of rocks there in token of ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... was not insensible to the innate loveliness of such a landscape neither, but felt a portion of that soothing of the spirit which is a common attendant of a scene so thoroughly pervaded by the holy cairn of nature. ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... prehistoric times and have proved true. Our archaeologists, for example, after long study of the remains, cannot tell us how long ago—centuries or thousands of years—a warrior with golden armour was buried under the great cairn at Mold in Flintshire. ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... a still stronger appeal. Ignorance is the source of most of our ills. Ignorant we must always be of much that we need to know, but there is no excuse for remaining ignorant of what somebody on earth knows or has known. Rich treasure lies hidden in what President Gilman called "the bibliothecal cairn" of scientific monographs which piles up about a university. The journalist might well exchange the muckrake for the ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... built up over it an oblong cairn of the ironstone boulders, made a rude temporary cross out of a spare waggon-pole, working quite methodically with saw and hammer and nails, and set it up, under the curious eyes he hated so, and wedged it fast and sure. Then he knelt down stiffly, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... The cairn stood before them at last, and as they rushed to it, and planted themselves on the topmost point, where still a few scraps of the scent lingered, all the fatigue and labour were forgotten in an exhilarating sense of ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... the gillies and retainers caught up the cry, and, with the wild enthusiasm that has marked the quick-hearted Irishman from Brian's day to this, "they all," so says the record, "kissed the ground and gave a terrible shout." Beacon fires blazed from cairn and hill-top, and from "the four points"—from north and south and east and west, came the men of Thomond rallying around their chieftains ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... he was cross the ford, Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor'd; And past the birks and meikie stane, Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane; And thro' the whins, and by the cairn, Whare hunters fand the murder'd bairn; And near the thorn, aboon the well, Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel.— Before him Doon pours all his floods; The doubling storm roars thro' the woods; The lightnings flash from ...
— Tam O'Shanter • Robert Burns
... edge of the terrace he saw a little cairn of broken bricks, and under them a piece of parchment. He caught it up and read: "We have waited past the midnight, and can delay no longer. We go to find the King. Follow us ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... year for ye. I've watched ye tak oop, first wi' this young fellar, and then wi' that, till soomtimes my heart's fit t' burst. Many a day, oop on t' fell-top, t' thought o' ye's nigh driven me daft, and I've left my shepherdin' jest t' set on a cairn in t' mist, picturin' an' broodin' on yer face. Many an evenin' I've started oop t' vicarage, wi' t' resolution t' speak right oot t' ye; but when it coomed t' point, a sort o' timidity seemed t' hould me back, I was that feared t' displease ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... stop when it was time for dinner, but carried rocks from a ridge a couple of hundred yards away, and built a cairn four feet high around the sapling, so that storm or wild animals could not knock it down. Then he began a search in the warmest and sunniest parts of the forest, where the green tips of plant life were beginning ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... 45-54, where the writer evidently traces the origin of the word Gilead to Gal-Ed. We gather from the context that the narrative was connected with the cairn at Mizpah which separated the Hebrew ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... pile, clawing the wall to keep my balance. My fingers were still many inches from the coping. I jumped down and gave another ten minutes to the back-breaking work of carrying more boulders from the water to the wall. Then I widened my cairn below, so that I could stand firmly before springing upon the pinnacle with which I completed it. I knew well that this would collapse under me if I allowed my weight to rest more than an instant upon it. And so at last it did; but my fingers had clutched the coping in time; ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... giant stones rests on a hillside across the lake, under the Cairn hill, with its pyramid crown. All these are within easy view from our first vantage-point on Knocknarea, yet they are but the outposts of an army which spreads everywhere throughout the land. They are as common in ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... meal on Christmas day they went out to look for the shepherd. They first made their way to Glam's cairn, guessing that he was the cause of the man's disappearance. On coming near to this they saw great tidings, for there they found the shepherd with his neck broken and every bone in his body smashed in pieces. They carried him to the church, and he did no harm to any ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... on with all the strength and energy I could command. I knew that in time I could raise the cairn as high as required, but time had now become the ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... mountain of Fuad the son of Brogan," [Footnote: An ancient Milesian hero. Brogan was uncle of Milesius.] said he. "I would I knew where lies his cairn in this great forest that I might pay my stone-tribute to the hero." Soon he found it and laid his stone upon the heap. He climbed to the hill's brow and looked westward and saw far away the white ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... lad now found himself was a very trying one, he had anticipated and planned for it. He had no boards with which to make a coffin, but there was plenty of stout canvas, and in a double thickness of this he sewed the body of his friend. Before doing so he dug away the snow beside a cairn of rocks that marked the last resting place of her who had gone before, and placed the electric heater, with extended wire connections, on the ground thus exposed. Within a few hours this soil became sufficiently thawed ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... a Continental officer ter injure them cairn ginooine Whigs," chimed in Hennion, "an' only swore an oath cuz it seemed bestest ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... was "born in the purple," so to speak, at Maxwelton House, in the beautiful glen of the Cairn—Glencairn. Her home was in the heart of the most pastorally lovely of Scottish shires—that of Dumfries. Her birth is thus set down by her father, in what ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... understand that the burying-places of great men, of kings, or priests, or generals, were likewise used for the celebration of other religious rites. Thus we read in the Book of Lecan, "that Amhalgaith built a cairn, for the purpose of holding a meeting of the Hy-Amhalgaith every year, and to view his ships and fleet going and coming, and as a place of interment for himself."(55) Nor does it follow, as some antiquarians maintain, that every structure in the style of a cromlech, even in England, is exclusively ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... over three hundred square miles of rolling, grassy, and heath-clad hills, of which about one-third is over the Scottish border in Roxburghshire. The giants of the range, The Cheviot (2,676 feet high), Cairn Hill (2,545 feet), and the striking cone of Hedgehope (2,348 feet), are all near to each other on Northumbrian soil, a few miles south-west of Wooler, which is a most convenient starting place for a visit to any part of the Cheviots, as the Alnwick and Cornhill Railway brings ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... Sleepy Hollow. The town itself has suffered comparatively few changes. True there is a trolley line through the main street—oddly called "The Milldam," and in Walden wood I met an automobile not far from the cairn, or stone pile, which marks the site of Thoreau's cabin. But the woods themselves were intact and the limpid waters of the pond had not been tapped to furnish power for any electric light company. The Old Manse looked ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... stranger,—as when to a maid A young man speaks, his voice was soft and low,— "Alas, no God am I; be not afraid, For even now the nodding daisies grow Whose seed above my grassy cairn shall blow, When I am nothing but a drift of white Dust in a cruse of gold; and nothing know But ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... me in the broad Jutland dialect I had neither heard nor spoken in half a lifetime, and so astonished me that I nearly fell off my chair. Sheep, peat-stacks, cairn, and hills all vanished together, and in place of the sweet heather there was the table with the tiresome papers. I reached out yearningly after the heath; I had not seen it for such a long time,—how long it did seem!—and—but in the same breath it was all there again in the smile ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... ain land," he cried, "and I'll never leave it. D'ye see yon broun hill wi' the lang cairn?" and he gripped my arm fiercely and directed my gaze. "Yon's my bit. I howkit it richt on the verra tap, and ilka year I gang there to make it neat and ordlerly. I've trystit wi' fower men in different pairishes ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... longer a reason to consider every cry of the birds or change of the night. Finn, who was always in the woods, whose battles were but hours amid years of hunting, delighted in the "cackling of ducks from the Lake of the Three Narrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an Cairn; the bellowing of the ox from the Valley of the Berries; the whistle of the eagle from the Valley of Victories or from the rough branches of the Ridge of the Stream; the grouse of the heather of Cruachan; the call of the otter of Druim re ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... Tweed; Or idly list the shrilling lay With which the milkmaid cheers her way, Marking its cadence rise and fail, As from the field, beneath her pail, She trips it down the uneven dale: Meeter for me, by yonder cairn, The ancient shepherd's tale to learn; Though oft he stop in rustic fear, Lest his old legends tire the ear Of one who, in his simple mind, May boast of ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... which the Queen calls in her journal "a very happy, lucky, and memorable one"—her Majesty and Prince Albert, with their family, household, tenants, servants, and poorer neighbours, ascended Craig Gowan, a hill near Balmoral, for the purpose of building a cairn, which was to commemorate the Queen and the Prince's having taken possession of their home in the north. At the "Moss House," half-way up, the Queen's piper met her, and preceded her, playing as he ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... course of the ages some one may have lived here, and we sometimes think that some one must. The coco-palms grow all round the island, which is scarce like nature's planting. We found besides, when we landed, an unmistakable cairn upon the beach; use unknown; but probably erected in the hope of gratifying some mumbo-jumbo whose very name is forgotten, by some thick-witted gentry whose very bones are lost. Then the island (witness the Directory) has been twice reported; and since my tenancy, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Circe's house to fetch the body of Elpenor. We cut firewood from a wood where the headland jutted out into the sea, and after we had wept over him and lamented him we performed his funeral rites. When his body and armour had been burned to ashes, we raised a cairn, set a stone over it, and at the top of the cairn we fixed the oar that he had been used ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... saw the black man pass the Muckle Cairn as it was chappin' six; before eicht, he gaed by the change-house at Knockdow; an' no lang after, Sandy M'Lellan saw him gaun linkin' doun the braes frae Kilmackerlie. There's little doubt but it was him that dwalled sae lang in Janet's body; but he was awa' at last; and sinsyne ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... Portobello in the distance, and of a fertile plain at the foot of the hill. In the course of our drive our cabman pointed out Dumbiedikes' house; also the cottage of Jeanie Deans,—at least, the spot where it formerly stood; and Muschat's Cairn, of which a small heap of stones is yet remaining. Near this latter object are the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel, a roofless gable, and other remains, standing on the abrupt hillside. We drove homeward past a parade-ground on which a body of cavalry was exercising, and we met ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... A cairn of ice blocks and snow bearing the American flag was erected approximately at the pole, April 7, 1909, and the party started on the return trip. There being a plain trail and smooth ice, the return trip was made in about half the time required for the outward trip. The reserve ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... the Hayters, Mary Gladstone, and a lot more have been here. I went north, too, to the land of Thule and was savagely happy. I wore no hat—no gloves—I bathed, fished, boated, climbed, and kissed the earth, and danced round a cairn. It was opposite Skye at a Heaven called Loch Ailsa.... Such beauty—such weather—such a fortnight will not come again. Perhaps it would be unjust to the crying world for one human being to have more of the Spirit of Delight; but one is glad to have tasted of the cup, and while it ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... loomed before him, gleaming in the moonlight, the cairn. For the first time in its annals, a Fellsgarth boy had got to ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... at the cairn whence she and Courtier had looked down at the herds of ponies. It was the merest memory now, vague and a little sweet, like the remembrance of some exceptional Spring day, when trees seem to flower before ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... already carved on a flat stone an inscription, in Roman letters, recording the visit of the "Foam" to English Bay, and a cairn having been erected to receive it, the tablet was solemnly lifted to its resting-place. Underneath I placed a tin box, containing a memorandum similar to that left at Jan Mayen, as well as a printed dinner invitation from Lady —, which I happened to have on board. Having ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... looked up to satisfy himself that his prospective well-site was high enough to avoid drainage from his pig-yard, then left the Murnan boy to pile up a cairn for the diggers. It would be good to have a windmill within ear-shot of the house, he mused; its squeaking would ease ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... settled habitation, and thus the earliest of all human arts and crafts, and perhaps also the noblest, is that of the builder. Religion took outward shape when men first reared an altar for their offerings, and surrounded it with a sanctuary of faith and awe, of pity and consolation, and piled a cairn to mark the graves where their dead lay asleep. History is no older than architecture. How fitting, then, that the idea and art of building should be made the basis of a great order of men which has no other aim than the upbuilding of humanity in Faith, Freedom, and Friendship. Seeking to ennoble ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... the birks and meikle stane Where drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane; And through the whins, and by the cairn Where hunters fand the murdered bairn And near the thorn, aboon the well Where Mungo's mither ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... spring shelved in by shale at the lower edge of the swell, we found a tiny cairn built of clumps of sod and bits of shale. Fastened on it was a scrap from Bill's ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... erected a cairn of stones over the bodies of the dead. All that was known of the massacre was vague Indian gossip. The Sioux reported that they had not intended to murder the priest, but a crazy-brained fanatic had shot the fatal arrow and broken from restraint, weapon in hand. Rain-storms ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... Queen Victoria took possession of Home-in-sight Island. After having given three hearty British cheers, in which the Eskimos tried to join, with but partial success, they buried the ginger-beer bottle under a heap of stones, a wooden cross was fixed on the top of the cairn, and then the party sat down to supper, while the Captain made a careful note of the latitude and longitude, which he had previously ascertained. This latest addition to Her Majesty's dominions was put down by him in latitude 85 degrees 32 minutes, or about 288 geographical miles ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... green meadow beyond it, and a single great pine; but all the rest is rocks, rocks. At the farther end the rocks are piled high, like a castle wall, making a brave barrier against the Atlantic waves; and on top of this cairn rises the lighthouse, rugged and sturdy as the rocks themselves, but painted white, and with its windows shining like great, smooth diamonds. This is Light Island; and it was in this direction that ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... cairn and moss, Out over scrog and scaur, He ran as runs the clansman That bears the cross of war. His heart beat in his body, His hair clove to his face, When he came at last in the gloaming To the dead man's brother's place. The east was white ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thin as those of our city buildings, and in some cases broken at their upper edges into rows of sharp pinnacles or inaccessible turf-coped turrets; while at the bottom of the hollows, washed by the runnels which, in the slow lapse of years, have been the architects of the whole, we find cairn-like accumulations of water-rolled stones,—the disengaged pebbles and boulders of the deposit. The boulders and pebbles project also from the steep sides, at all heights and of all sizes, like the primary masses inclosed in our ancient conglomerates, when exhibited in wave-worn ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... Mark forgotten, That was wise with his tongue and brave; And the cairn over Colan crumbled, And the ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... wild cairn of immense stones, Keeper suddenly began to bark furiously, and a tall, slight figure leaped from their shelter, raised a stick, and would have struck the dog if David had not called out, "Never strie a sheep-dog, mon! ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... everything save a few birds of prey. There were gloomy rocks on all sides, the dry bed of a forgotten river offered us an uncomfortable and often perilous path, and we passed several cairns of small stones. The Maalem left his mule in order to pick up stones and add one to each cairn, and as he did so he cursed Satan ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... the woman's answer that rose to her lips, the immediate response, that where he was would be what she liked best. It flushed in her cheek and it parted her lips, but it came not forth in words. Instead came a cairn question of business. ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... the park, and on and on by ways the attorney did not know, until at last they arrived at a little dell. The night was pitchy dark, and nothing could Ezekiel see but the ghostly figure gliding along ahead of him, all lit by a weird phosphorescent light. In the dell was a small granite cairn, and here the ghost stopped and looked around for ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... rapids. At no small pains Stonor dragged the body up here, and with his knife dug him a shallow grave between the roots of a conspicuous pine. It was a long, hard task. He covered him with brush in lieu of a coffin, and, throwing the earth back, heaped a cairn of stones on top. Placing a flat stone in the centre, he scratched the man's name on it and the date. He spoke no articulate prayer, ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... yon misty cairn their answer tost: "Minstrel! the fame of whose romantic lyre, Capricious-swelling now, may soon be lost, Like the light flickering of a cottage fire; If to such task presumptuous thou aspire, Seek not from us the meed to warrior due: Age after age has gathered son ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... is formed by the marriage of two streams, one flowing out of Strath Ardle and the other descending from Cairn Gowar through the long, lonely Pass of Glenshee. The Ericht begins at the bridge of Cally, and its placid, beautiful glen, unmarred by railway or factory, reaches almost down to Blairgowrie. On the southern bank, but far above the water, runs the high road to Braemar and the Linn ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... from our friends, not, however, without receiving from them some useful hints as to the descent into Silesia, we proceeded on, till we gained the loftiest peak of all. It is a huge cairn of loose stones, among which an innkeeper from Warmbrunn has built a tower; whither in the summer months he conveys food, wine, and beds, for all of which he, as may be expected, charges enormously. We had a pint of indifferent Rhine wine from him, which cost us a dollar, and we ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... Heracles by the might of his arms pulled the weary rowers along all together, and made the strong-knit timbers of the ship to quiver. But when, eager to reach the Mysian mainland, they passed along in sight of the mouth of Rhyndacus and the great cairn of Aegaeon, a little way from Phrygia, then Heracles, as he ploughed up the furrows of the roughened surge, broke his oar in the middle. And one half he held in both his hands as he fell sideways, the other the sea swept away with ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... to be considered is that of cairn or rock burial, which has prevailed and is still common to a considerable extent among the tribes living in the Rocky Mountains ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... hillock of mis-shapen stones Is not a Ruin spared or made by time, [1] Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem'st, the Cairn Of some old British Chief: 'tis nothing more Than the rude embryo of a little Dome 5 Or Pleasure-house, once destined to be built [2] Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle. [3] But, as it chanced, Sir William having ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... being written upon that we assign to them the character of gravestones, that is upright gravestones; but it is also well authenticated by historical records that the memorial of a Pagan chief in Ireland was a cairn with a pillar stone standing upon it, and there is little doubt that the Irish invaders carried the practice with them into Scotland. It is indeed in Scotland that a large proportion of these stones ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... ascent till she had on her right the moorland running south to the Lochan valley and on her left Garple chafing in its deep forested gorges. Her eyes were quick and she noted with interest a weasel creeping from a fern-clad cairn. A little way on she passed an old ewe in difficulties and assisted it to rise. "But for me, my wumman, ye'd hae been braxy ere nicht," she told it as it departed bleating. Then she realized that she had come a certain distance. "Losh, I maun be gettin' back or the hen will be spiled," ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... real man, Rather than that grey king, whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak, And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's, one Touched by the adulterous finger of a time That hovered between war and wantonness, And crownings ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... dull level of the field of ice. No wreath of smoke rose above the little island; it was manifestly impossible, they conceived, that any human being could there have survived the cold; the sad presentiment forced itself upon their minds that it was a mere cairn to ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne |
